About...OurTimeLines.com

Hi. My name is Ben. I guess I have to confess that this site has been sort of a labor of love for me.

It is an outgrowth, or side-effect, of genealogical software that I wrote to create the genealogy pages on blish.org.

On blish.org, my genealogy software creates timeline detail for every family member for whom I had birthdates. This adds a feel for what the times were like for that specific individual.

Then I built the CGI code for OurTimeLines.com so that similar benefits would be available to everyone else. Because... well, it just seemed like it would be fun. Turns out I was right. :o)

Your use of these Timelines

You may use the timelines you generate here on your own web pages (by copying the page source code, which you can view with your browser's "View Source" menu command.)

The only condition is that you ensure that there is a clearly visible link from each page where the timeline is used that leads back to http://ourtimelines.com so that your web page visitors may also have an opportunity to generate their own timelines.

Linking to ourtimelines.com

When you link to the site, it is very important that you link only to the root URL (in other words, http://www.ourtimelines.com) rather than "deep-linking" to the timeline generation page.

The generation page form will change its URL as we improve the site, and your links will break if you try to link to the forms pages. So please, save everyone some grief and just link to the root URL — and thanks!

In order for you to use these timelines on your site, you also must copy a 1x1 transparent GIF image to same directory as the timeline page. This image must have a file name of "z.gif", and you are welcome to use the one we use here.

What I can't do for you

I can't help you with building your own HTML pages. The timeline code will work - exactly as it is generated here - on your site under most web browsers as long as you copy or create the aforementioned 1x1 GIF image and place it in the same directory. If you can handle that, you're good to go. Otherwise, I suggest you locate someone with a little more experience to get the generated timeline HTML up and running on your own web site.